The fast food industry is an extremely competitive business. In order to remain competitive, it is paramount that a restaurant provide fast and efficient service and consistent quality products. If one cannot achieve this, then business will fall as will profits and market share. Thus, it is extremely important, particularly for chain restaurants, to be able to provide fast and efficient service with quality and consistent food products, not only within a single restaurant, but from restaurant to restaurant.
One of the major problems attendant with achieving the aforementioned objectives is with the restaurant staff. The nature of the business is that there will be a high turnover rate, a large number of employees working at one time and a change of personnel because of different working schedules throughout the day to accommodate what is normally a staff of young people, typically high school students.
To further compound this, each individual worker will prepare the food in a manner more suitable to his or her own particular taste, i.e., one person will prefer more spice or more flavor than another person. Further, with the exigencies of rush time in a restaurant, many single items of food are being handled in a very limited amount of time and space to accommodate the rush. What this leads to is a wide variation in the amount of condiment placed on a sandwich which gives an appearance of lack of consistency, unacceptable or questionable acceptability of the food and sometimes slow service to the consumer. What the restaurant sees is inefficiency, additional cost and lack of acceptance of the food product being served.
In preparing sandwiches, mustard and ketchup have extremely strong flavors which can mask the flavor of the remainder of the sandwich or overflavor it to a degree that it becomes unacceptable to a substantial portion of the consuming public. This is particularly true of mustard which has an extremely strong, masking flavor. The control of the amount of mustard and ketchup placed on a sandwich, as described above, has to date been difficult, if not almost impossible, to achieve. Typically, control of the quantity has been by employee training, manager observation and control.
The present invention provides an apparatus for overcoming the aforementioned problem in a simple and inexpensive manner. The invention lends itself to simplicity and speed of operation by any one of a number of different employees while still providing consistent results. Because of its design and simplicity, it is virtually foolproof in operation by what is normally a minimally trained employee. It also requires minimal or no counter space, which is a premium item in most fast food restaurants. Further, it can be adjusted before use and simply adjusted thereafter in order to vary the quantity of condiment dispensed.
An object of the present invention is to provide a condiment dispenser which is simple to operate and requires a minimum of training to teach an operator how to operate the dispenser.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a dispenser which is positive in operation and provides consistent results. A still further object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus which can be simply adjusted to vary the quantity of condiment to be dispensed, if such adjustment is needed.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus which will uniformly distribute condiment over substantially the entirety of the sandwich so that consistent flavor from bite to bite can be achieved. Another object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus which requires a minimum of counter space. A still further object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus which is inexpensive to manufacture, positive in operation and easy to maintain.